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Understanding and communicating an organisation’s relationship with nature — its impacts and dependencies — is no longer optional. Doing so builds credibility with stakeholders and customers alike, while giving companies the foresight to anticipate environmental risks before they materialise. It also strengthens long-term resilience by embedding sustainability into strategic decision-making. And increasingly, it’s what investors and financial institutions expect: capital is flowing toward organisations that can demonstrate genuine environmental responsibility and alignment with global sustainability commitments.
The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures published its final recommendations in September 2023. Since then, the question most organisations are sitting with isn’t whether to engage with TNFD — it’s how. The LEAP approach — Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare — is the methodological backbone of TNFD. It sounds sequential and tidy. In practice, it’s messier, more iterative, and considerably more data-intensive than most organisations expect. Here’s what each phase actually requires.
Locate
The first phase asks you to identify where your business interfaces with nature, across direct operations and your supply chain. In practice, this is where most mid-sized manufacturers get stuck. TNFD defines four types of nature interface: direct land use, freshwater use, sea use, and climate. But the challenge isn’t the taxonomy. It’s geography. Ecosystem conditions vary enormously at a local level. A supplier in the Brazilian Cerrado sits in a very different risk context than a comparable supplier in central Europe. A manufacturing site drawing from a stressed watershed faces different exposure than one in a water-abundant region.
This typically means starting with your top-tier suppliers and your own production sites, then overlaying their locations against available biome and ecosystem data. Tools like IBAT (Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool), WWF’s Risk Filter, or ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Dependencies) can help screen priority locations. None of them replace site-level judgment, but they establish a credible starting point to map your highest-priority nature interface points, segmented by geography and ecosystem type.
Evaluate
Once you know where your interfaces are, you need to ask what your operations and supply chains depend on and what they affect. TNFD uses the ENCORE database to link sector activities to ecosystem service dependencies and impacts. Some typical dependencies include freshwater supply, climate regulation, soil formation (for raw material inputs), and pollination. Impacts typically include GHG emissions, water pollution, land use change, and species disturbance.
The honest reality for most organisations: you probably don’t have the data to do this rigorously across your full supply chain. TNFD acknowledges this. The approach doesn’t require perfection — it requires a credible assessment of what is material. Qualitative scoring based on sector and geography is legitimate at early stages, as long as data gaps are documented and disclosed. A useful shortcut: sector-level materiality assessments already exist for sectors and sub-sectors. TNFD’s sector-specific guidance — covering food and agriculture, chemicals, construction materials, and others — provides a starting framework that can be adapted without building from scratch.
Assess
The Assess phase is where the work becomes strategic. You’re converting what you know about dependencies and impacts into a risk and opportunity register, categorised by physical risks (ecosystem degradation affecting operations), transition risks (regulatory, policy, and market change), and systemic risks (tipping points that affect entire value chains).
Some of the highest-probability risks? Supply chain disruption from water scarcity or land degradation in key sourcing regions; procurement policy requirements from large retail or financial sector clients; and access to green finance contingent on nature-related disclosure. Opportunities are less often discussed but genuinely exist. Verified low deforestation risk, reduced water intensity, or biodiversity-positive sourcing practices have a credible differentiator in conversations where regulatory pressure is flowing upstream. This is especially relevant for those operating in regulated EU markets.
Prepare
The Prepare phase covers two things that organisations often conflate: disclosure and strategy. On disclosure: TNFD recommends 14 disclosures, structured around governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. For a first report, organisations should aim for qualitative coverage of all four areas, with quantitative metrics for the highest-priority locations or materials. The goal is a coherent narrative, not a comprehensive data table.
On strategy: disclosure is the output, not the point. The more important outcome is a set of decisions about where to invest in ecosystem stewardship, which suppliers require targeted engagement, and what targets to set that are measurable and time-bound. A note on targets: the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) has published its first full corporate guidance for land, freshwater, and ocean. Aligning with SBTN standards — or at minimum with TNFD’s recommended metrics — gives targets credibility with investors and clients. Vague commitments like “improving our biodiversity footprint” are increasingly scrutinised. As always, think of KPIs and being SMART.
What a realistic first-year TNFD journey looks like
An organisation starting from scratch can complete a credible LEAP assessment in four to six months, with a dedicated internal resource and external support on data, stakeholder engagement, and methodology. The output typically includes: a nature-related risk and opportunity register; a priority location map; a disclosure narrative aligned with TNFD recommendations; and a hands-on roadmap for taking action.
That’s not a complete picture. TNFD itself frames disclosure as a multi-year learning process. What matters in year one is that the methodology is sound, the gaps are acknowledged, and the direction of travel is clear. The organisations that will struggle are those waiting for certainty before starting. The data won’t be perfect in year one. That’s expected, and disclosed. The window to get ahead of this — before it becomes a procurement or access-to-capital issue — is narrowing.
Are you ready to take action for nature?
We can offer you the right tool, methodology and approach to ensure your nature strategy goes under way. Contact us to find out more!
